Why Bernanke may have ended gold's bear market

When Ben Bernanke announced that the Federal Reserve would not reduce the pace of its $85 billion-per-month quantitative easing program, gold greeted the news with open arms. The yellow metal promptly added more than $50 after Wednesday's news to hit the highest level in a week.

But Peter Boockvar says we've only seen the beginning of gold's response to the news.

"The two-year bear market for gold is over, and the uptrend is going to resume," said Boockvar, chief market analyst at the Lindsey Group.

"Gold is your defense against your policies of the Fed, and in my eyes, the Fed lost a lot of credibility today," Boockvar told CNBC.com. "Just when you thought the Fed was very dovish, they pull an even more dovish act, and many in the markets were blindsided."

For Boockvar, gold's post-announcement move was "predicated on the idea that the Fed is going to repeat the mistakes of the mid-2000s, and way-overstay its welcome with QE." He owns gold, because he thinks that thesis will end up playing out.

"The Peter Boockvars of the world haven't learned that they were wrong about gold this whole time," Dow said. He says the idea that QE will create massive inflation "is kind of mindless, because the broader supply of money isn't growing. That money is just ending up as reserves."

But traders believe that the fundamental picture has changed. In fact, Wednesday's Fed decision changed Anthony Grisanti from a gold bear to a gold bull, but not for the reasons Boockvar outlined.

"It's not so much the fact the the Fed is continuing QE," said Grisanti, who is the founder of GRZ Energy and a CNBC contributor. "It's the message that's being sent, which is that the underlying economy is so bad that we can't taper $10 billion. That means that you want to own gold to protect yourself—and that's why I'm changing my opinion on gold."

In fact, even Dow isn't shorting gold's Wednesday bounce. "The longer-term time horizon is that the U.S. economy will heal, rates will go up and gold will go down," Dow said. "But most of the guys talking publicly about gold are still bearish, and until that flips and people get bullish again, the rally will probably continue."

After all, macro elements aside, "so much of this is about psychology and markets in general," Dow said, adding: "And no part of the market is more psychological than the precious metals."